


Quiet is in the Ear of the Beholder - Platonic VLD Week Day #2

by hufflepirate



Series: Platonic VLD Week [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Comfort Food, Cooking, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 06:43:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9981269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hufflepirate/pseuds/hufflepirate
Summary: It's been a stressful and messy few weeks since Shiro vanished.  Tensions have been high and emotions have been intense and volatile.  Waiting for Shiro to come out of the cryopod in the med bay is finally too much for Hunk to handle, but when half the team comes with him on his retreat to the kitchen, will it still be the calming space he needs?(It will.  I was gonna leave you in suspense, but I couldn't.  It will.  Things will be ok again.  They just might take some time.)Prompt was Quiet/Chaos.





	

One of the things Hunk liked about hanging out in the kitchen when times got tough was that it was usually quiet, just him and the goo machines and the stove and oven and sometimes Coran.

The quiet was all he'd really been thinking about when he told the others that he was going to go to the kitchen to work up something special for Shiro's first dinner back with them. Waiting beside the cryopods for Shiro to be healthy again and to wake up was too much, and the kitchen would give him space and - and that still didn't mean he could bring himself to tell Lance and Keith no when they offered to help.

It did sort of make sense, he thought to himself as he rummaged through the cabinets, Lance and Keith standing awkwardly behind him. They might have gotten Shiro back, but he was in pretty bad shape, and a lot had happened, and everyone was upset. That was fair. He was upset, too. And Lance never _had_ been good at dealing with those feelings by himself and he always _had_ sought out company at times like that, and Keith never _had_ been good at sitting still or not having things to do, especially when he was emotional, and Hunk just hoped they could avoid fighting with each other and completely wrecking his chill. They hadn't been great at that lately. Everyone had been too on edge.

He couldn't avoid the others for much longer, so he grabbed a couple of pots and a pan and straightened up again.

"So, what's the plan, my man?" Lance asked, his voice too cheerful to be genuine right now.

Hunk forced himself to smile. He appreciated the effort, and he didn't want Lance to feel discouraged. "I, uh - I dunno. I was just gonna kind of improvise?"

Lance nodded. "Good! Good. Yeah, your improvisations are always good. That stuff you made back on Arus with the - stuff. That was good!"

Hunk smiled, and this one was almost real. "Thanks. We don't have the stuff for that, but I figured I'd start by just kind of running through what we've got. I usually smell things first, kind of get a feel for what they are and what they might taste like."

Keith was antsy, his anxiety for Shiro coming off him in waves, like it had been for weeks. Ever since they came into the kitchen he had been opening and closing cabinets, one right after the other, to figure out what was in them. "What if we smell things, too?" he asked, "We can make a pile of stuff that smells good, and then you can decide what to use."

Hunk smiled at Keith, too, hoping it would help calm him down. "Sure! Yeah, that sounds good. Why don't you guys do that?"

Hunk wasn't sure exactly when it became a competition between his friends to see who could find the most things to go in his pile, but somewhere along the line it did, even without them speaking to each other. The single, central pile they'd started with gradually became three small piles in a row, as each of them set their contributions slightly apart from the rest, and they started watching each other out of the corners of their eyes.

Hunk almost laughed. Sometimes it was frustrating when Keith and Lance weren't getting along, but right now it just felt nicely _normal_. Keith had been trying to take a leadership role ever since Shiro vanished, and he wasn't bad at it, or anything, but it always felt like he was holding himself back, like he didn't think he could be the leader and follow his instincts at the same time, and then when he finally couldn't hold back anymore, he exploded at them. It was nice to see him acting more like himself, even if this impulse was kind of a silly one. Maybe _especially_ because this impulse was kind of a silly one.

Hunk started watching the piles, himself, and when they were exactly even, he interrupted the game. "Hey, guys, I think we've got enough stuff here. Any more and it'll actually get harder to sort through instead of easier. Too many choices, you know?"

Keith looked at the piles, then at Lance, who looked a little bit disappointed, but not too much, then met Hunk's eyes and smirked slightly, half apologetic. The expression faded quickly, lasting just long enough for Hunk to know that Keith realized what he'd done and was ok with it. This time, Hunk actually laughed, surprising himself.

"What?" Lance asked, "What did I miss?"

Hunk calmed himself down, patting Lance on the shoulder. "Nothing. It's just - it's gonna be nice having Shiro back and getting back to normal. It feels like we're almost getting back to normal."

Sorting through the pile was tense at first, because Hunk both wanted to find stuff that would actually be good together and wanted to keep from clearly favoring one of his friends over the other, but it got easier once he could start eliminating things and distract the others by letting them put things away. The three big piles became one medium-sized pile, became a small pile of just the things he needed.

The rest of the experimenting was less easy to involve the others in, but that was ok, because something in the room was less tense, already, and Hunk could feel the usual calm of the kitchen washing over him. It even seemed to be working on Lance and Keith, which was good. Keith had been exploding intermittently for weeks and Lance had been crying at night, for reasons Hunk hadn't understood enough to do any more about than leave cups of Altean tea outside the door for him, and it was good to feel like he might not have to deal with either of those things today.

Lance sat on the counter next to the stove while Hunk was working, rambling about the food he missed from home and the times he'd helped his mom in the kitchen and how his abuela always used to make the best boliche, and turning Hunk's pots and pans absent-mindedly sideways any time he stepped away, so the handles weren't hanging out over the side. Hunk wasn't sure if he was supposed to be listening, but Lance didn't seem to care one way or the other, so he just tuned in and out, letting his friend's voice turn into ambient noise while he worked.

Keith still couldn't stand still, but that was ok, because he'd found himself a new task - wiping down all the counters and then washing pots and pans as Hunk finished with them. Hunk made a point of using a few more pans than he really needed, just to give Keith something to do.

Pidge joined them, walking in to Lance's babbling and Keith's running water and occasional pot banging and Hunk's multiple pans sizzling on the stove, and hopped up on the counter to Hunk's other side. "Wow, it's really quiet in here," she said to Hunk, "I kinda figured they'd be fighting by now."

Hunk snorted. "How's he doing?" he asked.

Lance stopped talking and Keith's hands stilled at the sink.

"He's doing better. Coran says he's sure he's gonna pull through, and he and Allura and the mice are still waiting in there with him. They've been singing these weird Altean healing songs for ages, but I don't know enough Altean to make any sense of them."

Hunk hadn't realized how much better the three of them were doing, not really, but now that Pidge was here, sounding as sad and overwhelmed as he'd felt walking into the kitchen, he was glad she'd joined them, because he was pretty sure they could help.

"Here," he said, grabbing one of the tasting spoons Keith had been keeping scrupulously clean for him and dipping it into the sauce on the stove, "taste this."

Pidge blew on it and then complied. "That's really good!"

He smiled. "Thanks. I think it's gonna be good. I mean, all together. As a homecoming dinner."

She nodded.

Hunk took the spoon back and then ducked backward to hand it to Keith.

"Why'd you turn the pot sideways?" Pidge asked behind him.

"Oh! Yeah, old habit, I guess. From my younger siblings. You're not supposed to put the handles where a kid could reach up and grab at them and get burned. They don't know better when they're little and can dump boiling water on themselves and stuff."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

Hunk stepped back into his spot at the stove, leaving the pot turned to the side like Lance had left it.

Pidge and Lance talked back and forth quietly around him, babbling about homecoming dinners, the stuff Lance would want, the stuff Pidge's family used to eat when her dad came home, the fact that they never ate peas because her dad liked the Garrison's peas better, on and on aimlessly and without much intensity. Keith leaned against the sink and listened and washed things when they got dirty. Hunk tasted, tested, tweaked. Dinner took shape. Things felt ok again. When Shiro came to, they cried, but not like they'd been crying for all these tense, stressed weeks of searching. They cried, and flushed out the last of it, and went to dinner with real smiles for the first time in a long time.

When they split off to go to bed, nobody stormed off, or yelled, or cried in their rooms. Everyone was full, and everything was quiet. Hunk knew Shiro wasn't back here in the barracks with them, but he knew he could be, and would be soon, if Hunk could do anything about it. Tonight, Shiro could sit on the bridge and look out at the stars, and tomorrow they'd all get back to trying to heal him. It was they least they could do when his return had already done so much to heal the rest of them.


End file.
